In 1943, at the height of the
War, the London-born John Barbirolli had returned to England from
New York, to take on the difficult task of rebuilding the depleted
Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. His achievement in
accomplishing the transformation of an orchestra that had suffered
from the conscription into the armed forces of many of its male
members and the uncertainties of public and personal war-time
privations, was astonishing: within months, the reconstituted
Hallé Orchestra under Barbirolli had given a series of
concerts that heralded a transformation in British orchestral life,
followed by two major recordings sponsored by the British Council
– the first recording of a Symphony by Arnold Bax (No 3), and
the world premiere recording of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth
Symphony, which had received its first performance in London less
than a year earlier at the Henry Wood Proms, conducted by the
composer. Barbirolli went on to conduct the world premieres of both
the Seventh Antartica and Eighth Symphonies (the latter work is
dedicated to him as ‘Glorious John’) – but it was
not until 1950 that Barbirolli conducted the Fourth Symphony for
the first time.

Earlier issues from the
Barbirolli Society have documented the conductor’s deep
empathy with the Vaughan Williams’s music. Barbirolli’s
performance of the Fourth Symphony is, overall, almost
five-and-a-half minutes longer than the composer’s own, yet
it is no less overwhelmingly powerful, if less concentrated in its
fury. Barbirolli digs deep into this work, and the result is a
performance that must have delighted the composer, for existing
correspondence between the two men around that time acknowledges
the composer’s heartfelt thanks to the conductor in
programming all six (then) extant symphonies in the first
Hallé season in the new Free Trade Hall marking Vaughan
Williams’s 80th birthday in 1952. In February, 1953,
Barbirolli and the Hallé were to give the premiere of the
Seventh Symphony (recording it for HMV soon afterwards).

Arthur Benjamin’s
Symphony is a fine work, deeply serious and cogently argued, and
there is no doubt that – despite the inevitable shortcomings
in broadcast sound of well over 60 years ago – Barbirolli
gives a staggeringly impressive and committed premiere of the
music.